On something of a whim, I picked up The Gamemaster’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying, by Jonah and Tristan Fishel, which has been going around recently. And when I picked it up, I’m not sure I had super high hopes– maybe some interesting tips or ideas, but nothing big. But I was immediately grabbed by the central contention of the introduction, that centering our games around big, bad, looming threats from some external agent can make for unsatisfying games.
More than that, though, their discussion got me thinking about how central these tropes are to so much of popular culture; and how frequently we even frame our political lives and agency in terms of these tropes. At times, these tropes can even seem like what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls a deep story. And it got me thinking that limiting our political imaginations to this kind of narrative provides us with an impoverished way of thinking of our lives: it’s at least as meaningful to think of our lives in terms of building, of making community, of caring for each other than it is to think in terms of fighting pluckily against some mighty but implacable foe. We cede a lot of narrative ground if we assume our political opponents are brilliant omega level mutants or the Galactic Empire. And there may be value in building things that don’t slot into this narrative structure.